When Getssy talks about her career, she doesn’t tell it in linear progression. It feels more like a series of experiments, lessons, and leaps of faith stitched together with curiosity and grit.
“Frankly speaking, every day has been different for me. The role may remain the same, but the challenges never do. That’s what keeps me going,” she says with a smile. Her story at ABB began way back in 2014, fresh out of college, as a Management Trainee. The MV Drives install-base was at its peak then, and the product engineering team (PEQ) was in full swing with one of its flagship products - ACS2000.
“Right out of college, I didn’t expect the kind of exposure I got,” she recalls. “We were setting up our own DIY lab with bare minimum resources to test failures in the field. Imagine coming straight from theory to such raw, hands-on problem-solving; it was quite intense.”
Her early years were all about root cause analysis, component testing, and making sense of how variable frequency drives performed in the “real world.” Failures from harsh industrial environments often landed on her desk, and instead of getting overwhelmed, Getssy learned to enjoy the detective work. “While service teams focus on getting systems back up and running quickly, in product engineering our role is to go one step further, to ask ‘why’ and uncover the root cause. That curiosity is what drove me to dig deeper.”
But digging deeper also revealed her own limitations. At one point, she felt she had reached a ceiling with her B. Tech degree. “I knew what failed, but I wanted to understand why at a much more fundamental level. To speak the language of R&D, I had to strengthen my foundation.” That thought led her to take the bold step of pausing her career to pursue a Master’s in Power Electronics at TU Delft, Netherlands.
It wasn’t easy, I had to quit my job at ABB to make it happen. But somewhere, I knew pursuing a master’s degree was the right step. And looking back, it was probably one of the best decisions of my life.
During her M. Tech journey, Getssy’s ABB work experience gave her a unique advantage. “What I learned at ABB earlier suddenly started making sense at a much deeper level in my classes. It felt like connecting dots backwards,” she explains with a sense of achievement.
During that period, she even interned with ABB in Finland and Sweden. “It was sheer luck, but also a reminder that when you stay true to your domain, doors open.” Soon after, fate pulled her back home. A casual conversation with her HR, about an opening in her old team turned into a full-circle moment. ABB wanted someone who understood both the product and the team. Getssy, now equipped with new skills and perspective, was the perfect fit. She returned as Team Lead for the MV Drives PEQ team.
Since then, she has been at the heart of some breakthrough projects, from special commissioning of ACS5000 drives for a large air separation unit OEM, to retrofits, to leading critical certification projects. Her personal highlight? The high-pressure commissioning projects. “Those moments teach you to trust your instincts and go back to basics. When you’re under pressure, fancy theories don’t save you, clarity and step-by-step logic does.”
Today, her team may be small, with Avinash managing product coordination, Charan on failure analysis, and a new member joining soon. However, the impact they deliver is anything but small. They work not only on failure analysis but also on global collaborations, engineering change notices, and ensuring that ABB’s drives are technically uniform and reliable across geographies. “The motto is simple: no matter where in the world a drive is manufactured, its performance and quality should be the same.”
For Getssy, the thrill still lies in the unknown. “Every day, something new comes up. Some topics I don’t fully know, and I have to go research it. That’s what excites me. There’s no boredom here. The role allows you to explore your full technical potential but it’s up to the individual to harness it.”
And if you ask her what ties all these phases of her journey together, she answers without hesitation: “Technical know-how. That’s ABB’s strength, and it’s mine too. The technology is what drives us forward and for me, it’s also what makes this whole ride worth it.”
